Eye/Balls is dispiriting and nonsensical

It would be easy to conclude that the National Youth Theatre has a one-track mind.

On Monday, the first night in its month-long residency at Soho, the topic of the drama was glamour modelling, with a requisite scantily-clad heroine.

Here we've moved on to lap dancing, which means a scantily-clad heroine, plus her colleagues.

If the NYT has a point to make about the commodification of women, it seems determined to ensure its punters get an eyeful of them first.

There's a hard-hitting play to be written about the financial struggles of today's students and the desperate measures to which some of them, women especially, resort.

To quote the old phrase, Eye/Balls is decidedly not that play.

Sarah Solemani has instead come up with a dispiriting interlinked double bill, stuffed full of nonsensical situations and chasms down which narrative logic plunges in terror.

For instance, it's largely set in a Dublin where only one character out of dozens has an Irish accent.

Diana (Carly-Jayne Hutchinson) wants to study art history at a prestigious Dublin college. It will have her if she can prove she's able to fund her course.

As she is estranged from her family and with a new baby to care for, this doesn't look promising.

Thus she does what most prospective students would, namely walk straight out of her interview and move into the interviewer's house.

Which is, of course, run as an illdefined commune-cum-free-love-experiment-cum-pimp-joint.

So Eye rumbles on, hinting at all manner of dark deeds without ever quite clarifying why anyone is behaving the way they are.

At least Balls, which skilfully returns to Diana via a niftily depicted stag weekend in Dublin, doesn't have such witless dialogue, or so many actors in desperate need of having their flapping hands gaffer-taped to their sides.

Director Gbolahan Obisesan can at last have a bit of fun, what with all the macho posturing and the dark truths that lie buried beneath the oppressive group impulse to go on an almighty bender.

None of this makes overmuch sense either, but it's a far less tortuous watch.